Helping Communities Through Education

Monthly Archives: November 2016

Dear readers, we are wishing you a very happy Wednesday and hope you all had an enjoyable Thanksgiving with your loved ones. As per usual we would like share with you all the recent events in Pakistan, as to keep you updated with the headlines affecting the areas where our schools are run.

Pakistan puts an “unofficial hold” on cotton imports from India

In light of the hostility between India and Pakistan, Pakistan has suspended cotton imports from hits number one supplier. If this hold continues it can threaten to bring down an $822 million per year industry. Pakistan will seek out other cotton suppliers such as Brazil and United States to substitute India’s exports to Pakistan. Pakistan states that the Indian products have “received some complaints regarding insects, pests, in cotton consignments imported from India, so we have sent samples for tests .. If results show non-compliance of phyto-sanitary requirements, we would have to stop the imports from India.”

In 2015-2016, Pakistan surpassed Bangladesh in becoming the largest buyer of India’s cotton, in fact they make up 40% of India’s cotton exports.

Qamar Javed Bajwa was assigned the position of being the new head of Pakistan’s military in the midst of tensions with Afghanistan and hostility with India over the controversial Kashmir region. Bajwa strongly believe that the Kashmir dispute must be resolved in order to ensure regional stability. Although Bajwa is a “fresh face,” he has inherited a plethora of problems, which will be challenging for him to deal with.

With tensions already being high between India and Pakistan, a group of militants that are dressed in police officer uniform “attacked an Indian Army unit in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, killing seven soldiers, the Indian government said in a statement.”

On that same day, “Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir reported killing three heavily armed militants after a battle near the town of Ramgarh, on the Pakistani border, that lasted several hours.”

The historical hostility and tension between the two countries escalated on September 18th, when militants attacked an Indian Army post in the volatile and conflict area of Kashmir, which resulted in the death of 19 Indian soldiers. India fought back by conducted military strikes a couple of weeks later.

Since the Indian partition of 1947 and gaining independence from the British, India and Pakistan have been at war a total of three times.

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Good afternoon readers! Below you find a short summary of recent events and news that have taken place in Afghanistan in the last weeks.

Humanitarian organizations are not meeting their goals of helping individuals in war zones.

In the recent wave of violence and insecurity that has hit Pakistan and Afghanistan, many believe that the presence of International Development professionals and humanitarians are declining. This is attributed to studies that have been conducted in high-risk countries making it more and more difficult to recruit volunteers and workers in countries like Afghanistan. Additionally, the general public and donors are donating less because it seems “incentives to highlight the presence of such organisations on the ground to the general public and donors meant they sometimes overstated their impact, inadvertently making humanitarian situations appear less dire than they were.”

Sharbat Gula, the famous green-eyed Afghan Girl who was photographed by world renowned Steve McCurry, was featured in National Geographic in an issue in 1985. Her face became an icon of the suffering and being refugee in the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan. She was arrested last month for living illegally in Pewshara, Pakistan as a refugee with false paperwork, and was deported by Pakistan to her native Afghanistan. After the fact, Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, welcomed her back in the country, and stated “I’ve said repeatedly, and I like to repeat it again, that our country is incomplete until we absorb all of our refugees.” Ghani has ensured that she must “live with dignity and security in her homeland” and has given her a furnished apartment.

The U.S. military has confirmed that they were responsible for killing al-Qaeda’s Farouq an Qhatani, a senior official in the organization. The Pentagon describes this act as a “precision strike,” which took place on October 23rd, in Kunar. This assault is considered to be one of the most successful and significant strikes against al-Qaeda in many years. The United States has been tracking Qahtani down for four years, as he was closely connected with Osama bin Laden, and was a senior Al-Aeda leader operating in Afghanistan from 2009.

We hope you enjoyed the short summary, and hope to catch you next week for more. We here at Barakat are putting together our end of the year fundraiser. To make any donations please visit this site https://barakatworld.networkforgood.com.